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In the past fifteen years, many internal IT departments of enterprises evolved from artisan organizations that only assembled and provided customized, tailor-made products, to hybrid craft and mass production organizations that provides custom as well as standard products. But nowadays these IT departments are confronted with external organizations that deliver standard services and products that can be easily adapted to the needs of the customer based on the concept of “mass customization”.
Instead of buying, owning, and managing all kinds of IT components by yourself, nowadays the IT infrastructure is offered as a service by means of cloud computing.

There is a shift from “goods dominant logic” to a “service dominant logic”, were the focus is shifting away from tangibles and toward intangibles. This trend is supported by the use of virtualization technology for server, storage and network devices and also for applications.

The cloud computing offering of lower costs, shorter time to market, and on demand provisioning makes it very tempting for organizations to outsource their IT infrastructure and services.

But don’t we forget something? One of the most important things of information processing is that an organization has the right controls over the use of applications, data and infrastructure. Incomplete control can lead to all kinds of issues about business obligations and liabilities.

The control of these items is arranged by contracts, which is in fact an exchange of property rights. These property rights are a bit complicated because they have several dimensions:
• The right of possession
• The right of control
• The right of exclusion (access rights)
• The right of enjoyment (earn income from it)
• The right of disposition (buying or selling)

The consequence of these different dimensions is that different parties are able to hold partitions of rights to particular elements of a resource. On top of this there is the issue of legislation. When we talk about ownership we have to be careful because in legal systems ownership is based on tangible/physical objects. And yes of course, we have legislation about intellectual property, trademarks, etc. but when it comes to virtualized objects it becomes murky. Also cloud computing is about delivering services (intangibles) not about goods (tangibles).

The transition from “goods dominant logic” to a “service dominant logic” is a mind shift where the “bundle of rights” or property ownership still matters.

Signing cloud computing deals is not only about money and provisioning it is also about control. When a cloud computing sourcing deal is taking place the partitions of property rights should be grouped into appropriate bundles to stay in control.

Over the past years, award winners have included companies such as Equinix, TelecityGroup, Interxion, Cohesive FT, iomart, Colt Technology Services, Cofely GDS Suez/akquinet GmbH, Claranet, 6Degrees, Prior1 GmbH, The Open Compute Foundation, Portugal Telecom, and NTT Communications among many others…

Now in its 8th year, the prestigious Awards provide exceptional marketing differentiation for both winners and runners up and recognized as the premier industry accolade across Europe and internationally.

With an extended panel of expert Judges, the 2015 categories, including new Cloud Awards, are designed to reflect changes in markets and technologies, but retain a focus on recognising best in class and excellence across the industry.

In 2015 the Awards will again provide new benchmarks of aspiration for the companies shortlisted and world class recognition for winners.

Thomson Reuters made a nice visualisation on Europe’s aging nuclear reactors. Currently the EU operates 131 reactors with an average age of 30 years.

It reminded me on a report I wrote in 2012 for Broadgroup about the power market and data centers in Europe. The quality and availability of the data center stands or falls with the quality and availability of the power supply to the data center. So the power market is something to watch closely.

Depending on the power technology that is being used, power plants have different life cycles. Coal-fired plants have a life cycle of about 40 years, gas-fired: 30 years, nuclear: 40 years, hydro: 80 years, and renewables are estimated on 25 years. Based on this life cycle estimates we can say that Europe has an ageing power plant fleet. A report of RWE states that for hard coal power plants more than 70% are in their half of their life cycle, for lignite and gas/oil more than 60% and more than 50% of the plants are in their half of their life cycle. For hard coal plants, based on the EU Large Combustion Plants Directive, replacement of all these plants is needed by 2030.

There is the expectation that the nuclear reactor lifetime is 40 years or more. The implication of a forty-year life expectancy is that in the next ten years (from 2012 onwards) forty nuclear power plants will be closed or 30% of the current nuclear power plant fleet. This would be a decommissioning of 30207 Mw net capacity, or 24.5% of the nuclear power capacity.

Given the fact that the average age of the 130 units that already have been closed worldwide is about 22 years, the projected operational lifetime of 40 year or more appears rather optimistic.

The decommissioning of nuclear power plants, has an impact on the carbon policies and targets and can create a shortage in power and a rise of the electricity price if proper counter measures are not taken.

Number of nuclear power plants EOL with a forty-year life expectation scenario (Broadgroup 2012)

A special case is Belgium. Two nuclear reactors were closed for a second time in march 2014 because of cracks in the steel reactor casings. The nuclear reactors Doel 3 and Tihange 2 in Belgium will be restarted earliest in the spring of 2015 and there is an increased chance that will be closed forever.

In august another nuclear reactor, Doel 4, has to be shut down after major damage to its turbine because of oil leakage. Electrabel said its Doel 4 nuclear reactor would stay offline at least until the end of this year, with the cause confirmed as sabotage.

As a result of this just over 3 GW of power is offline, more than half of the nuclear power supply. Whereas nuclear power contributes about 50% of the electricity produced domestically.

So there is the possibility of blackouts this winter so Belgium will have to boost interconnection capacity with neighbouring countries to prevent power shortages.

According to the Minister of Energy Johan Vande Lanotte the last electricity consumption record was recorded on 17 January 2013, “On such a cold winter day, we consume about 14,000 megawatts. With the current production we come 1000 too short.”

Much depends on the weather, potential problems are to be expected from the end of october or early november according to Elia, Belgium’s electricity transmission system operator.

Recently I had an interesting conversation with John Booth of Carbon3IT (who is also Chairman of DCA Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Steering Group) about my latest book on sustainable data centers. The discussion focussed on what the book is addressing and the level of abstraction that is being used.

Based on this discussion I made a short presentation with a different visualization of the idea behind the book and the informal use of an enterprise architecture framework when writing the book.

Although not stated explicitly, the book is loosely based on an Enterprise Architecture Framework. This EA framework has four Architecture domains:

Business architecture

Information architecture

Information systems (application) architecture

Infrastructure architecture

For each of these architecture domains, this EA framework shows five levels of abstraction;

Large events can have a serious impact on IT infrastructure. A great example of this is the current football World Cup 2014.

RIPE NCC, one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), does a great job with collecting data of the network traffic during the event. In collaboration with the European Internet Exchange Association (Euro-IX) they follow the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) traffic during the championship.

Two examples from their research. The following graphs shows in red the traffic of the match day and the same day of the week in the weeks before as grey lines. The game times are indicated as grey rectangles in the background.

The Netherlands – Spain

The traffic volume during the Netherlands-Spain game differs 256 Terabytes to the week before!

Traffic statistics at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX).

Cameroon – Brazil

Traffic statistics at the PTT Metro IXP in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

These traffic drops makes you wonder how much energy was saved by these games.

More information about the network traffic can be found at RIPE NCC and more information will follow during the World Cup.

“Data Center 2.0, is not so much about technology but about people, society and economic development. By helping readers understand that even if Data Centers, enabling the Digital economy, are contributing a lot to energy saving, they need to be sustainable themselves; Rien Dijkstra is on the right track. When explaining how to build sustainable Data Centers, through multi disciplinary approach, breaking the usual silos of the different expertise, Rien Dijkstra is proposing the change of behavior needed to build sustainable Data Centers. Definitely it is about people, not technology.”

“In Data Center 2.0 The Sustainable Data Center author Rien Dijkstra has gone several steps further in viewing the data center from the perspective of long term ownership and efficiency in combination with treating it as a system. It’s an excellent read with many sections that could be extracted and utilized in their own right. I highly recommend this read for IT leaders who are struggling with the questions of whether to add capacity (co-locate, buy, build, or lease) or how to create a stronger organizational ownership model for existing data center capacity. The questions get more complex every year and the risks more serious for the business. The fact that you’re making a business critical decision that must stand the test of technology and business change over 15 years is something you shouldn’t take lightly.”

Mark Thiele, President and Founder Data Center Pulse

“Data centers used to be buildings to house computer servers along with network and storage systems, a physical manifestation of the Digital Economy. Internet of Things, the digitization of about everything in and around us, brings many profound changes. A data center is the place where it all comes together. Physical and digital life, fueled by energy and IT, economical and social demands and needs and not to forget sustainability considerations. Sustainable data centers have a great potential to help society to optimize the use of resources and to eliminate or reduce wastes of capital, human labor and energy. A data center in that sense is much more than just a building for servers. It has become a new business model. Data center 2.0 is a remarkable book that describes the steps and phases to facilitate and achieve this paradigm.”

Data Center 2.0: The Sustainable Data Center is an in-depth look into the steps needed to transform modern-day data centers into sustainable entities.

To get an impression of the book you can read the prologue right here.

Prologue

In large parts of the world, computers, Internet services, mobile communication, and cloud computing have become a part of our daily lives, professional and private. Information and communication technology has invaded our life and is recognized as a crucial enabler of economic and social activities across all sectors of our society. The opportunity of anytime, anywhere being connected to communicate and interact and to exchange data is changing the world.

During the last two decades, a digital information infrastructure has been created whose functioning is critical to our society, governmental, and business processes and services, which depend on computers. Data centers, buildings to house computer servers along with network and storage systems, are a crucial part of this critical digital infrastructure. They are the physical manifestation of the digital economy and the virtual and digital information infrastructure, were data is processed, stored, and transmitted.

A data center is a very peculiar and special place. It is the place were different worlds meet each other. It is a place where organizational (and individual) information needs and demands are translated in bits and bytes that are subsequently translated in electrons that are moved around the world. It is the place where the business, IT, and energy worlds come together. Jointly they form a jigsaw puzzle of stakeholders with different and sometimes conflicting interests and objectives that are hard to manage and to control.

Electricity is the foundation of all digital information processing and digital services that are mostly provided from data centers. The quality and availability of the data center stands or falls with the quality and availability of the power supply to the data center.

For data centers, the observation is made that the annualized costs of power-related infrastructure has, in some cases, grown to equal the annualized capital costs of the IT equipment itself. Data centers have reached the point that the electricity costs of a server over its lifetime will equal or pass the price of the hardware. Also, it is estimated that data centers are responsible for about 2% of the total world electricity consumption.

It is therefore easy to understand why the topic of electricity usage of data centers is a subject of discussion.

Electricity is still mostly generated with fossil fuel-based primary energy resources such as coal, gas, and oil. But this carbon-constrained power sector is under pressure. Resilience to a changing climate makes the decarburization of these energy sources mandatory to ensure sustainability.

From different parts of society the sustainability of data centers is questioned. Energy efficiency and indirect CO2 emissions caused by the consumption of carbon-based electricity are criticized.

The data center industry is working hard on these issues. According to the common view, it comes down to implementing technical measures. The idea is that more efficient power usage of servers, storage and network components, improved utilization, and better power and cooling management in data centers will solve the problems.

This idea can be questioned. Data centers are part of complex supply chains and have many stakeholders with differing perspectives, incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements and complex interdependencies. In this situation there is no simple, clear definition of data center efficiency, and there is no simple right or optimal solution.

According to the Brundtland Commision of the United Nations, sustainability is “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Given the fact that we are living in a world with limited resources and the demand for digital infrastructure is growing exponentially, there will be limits that will be encountered. The limiting factor to future economic development is the availability and the functioning of natural capital. Therefore, we need a new and better industrial model.

Creating sustainable data centers is not a technical problem but an economic problem to be solved.

A sustainable data center should be environmentally viable, economically equitable, and socially bearable.

This book takes a conceptual approach to the subject of data centers and sustainability. The proposition of the book is that we must fundamentally rethink the “data center equation” of “people, planet, profit” in order to become sustainable.

The scope of this search goes beyond the walls of the data center itself. Given the great potential of information technology to transform today’s society into one characterized by sustainability what is the position of data centers?

The data center is the place where it all comes together: energy, IT, and societal demands and needs.

Sustainable data centers have a great potential to help society to optimize the use of resources and to eliminate or reduce wastes of capital, human labor and energy.

The idea is that a sustainable data center is based on economics, organization, people and technology. This book offers at least multiple views and aspects on sustainable data centers to allow readers to gain a better understanding and provoke thoughts on how to create sustainable data centers.

Creating a sustainable data center calls for a multidisciplinary approach and for different views and perspectives in order to obtain a good understanding of what is at stake.